


Lucky Thirteen

by wonseokie



Category: Aldnoah.Zero (Anime & Manga)
Genre: M/M, Mafia AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-03-29 22:00:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19028782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wonseokie/pseuds/wonseokie
Summary: Inaho Kaizuka disappeared six years ago--but now he's back, and he's ready to take his place as the Thirteenth Family Head.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> this is an old fic that i just now again found, and i wanted to post it, so here it is. posting will be every other week!

The sky was overcast—throwing the world into gloomy shadow, making everything seem more sluggish. It was completely unusual, for this time of the year, when the weather should have been bright and warm. It would, later, turn out to be the first sign of an incoming flux of troubles for the Deucalion family: a sign that none of them deigned to either believe in or listen to.

That was their first mistake.

The first of their troubles manifested in one of the family cars, nondescript and simple as it was. It carried their young heir, Inaho, in the backseat. He was on his way to school. It had stalled in the middle of the road, prompting the driver and a guard to step out to check on the engine. It had been checked earlier that day, and nothing seemed to have been obviously wrong with it. For it to stall now is suspicious—thus the high alertness that the guards are in a state of. They'd lay their lives down for their heir, they _would_ , without a doubt.

The driver had finally gotten the engine running again, and was closing the hood, when it happened. Their second trouble, on that day, were armed assailants. The driver fell to the sound of two loud pops, and the guard outside—who wasn't fast enough to pull out his own gun—fell after two more.

The guard that stayed behind with Inaho remained calm and alert, leading him to kneel on the footwell of the car to remain shielded. He managed to fell three of their assailants before getting hit in the shoulder, but even through the pain, he had continued fighting. He handed his sidearm to Inaho—unable to use it anyway, with his injured shoulder—and the boy shot—true and sure—another assailant coming from the back of the car.

The two of them were managing well—apparently, none of their attackers had known that Inaho was such a good shot at his age. What did them—and their third trouble—was the bomb implanted on the engine. The hood was closed, so it lessened the impact some, but there was only so much that reinforced steel chassis and bulletproof glass can do against a C5 plastic explosive.

The car flipped twice, the guard using his body shield Inaho from the worst of it. One particular lip had dislodged one o the bullets on is shoulder, causing him to bleed out and all over the young boy's school uniform.

“I'm sorry,” he breathed, feeling like one big bruise and getting weaker with each second. “Be safe, sir.”

They were his last words, before he used the last of his strength shooting any and all attackers coming for them in the car. Inaho hadn't even heard. He'd fallen unconscious.

That was the last time anyone from his family would hear from Inaho for a long time.  



	2. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Six years later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> have fun~

The evening landscape outside the window looks so different it's almost wrong.

_I guess it's human nature to think of anything that's different as wrong._

At the estate, everything around for _miles_ was trees, grass, and flowers. Here, though, in the middle of the city, the trees were skyscrapers, the grass is concrete, and the flowers are people. There's a beauty to it that one must appreciate: how so many lives are encapsulated in tiny flickers of light in the distance; how every moving body, every moving car, every moving _thing_ has a purpose; how one could feel so stifled and lost, even at the top floor of the city's most expensive condominiums.

Yuki stares outside, her sketchbook laid open on her lap and her fingertips stained with graphite and charcoal. She has an itching urge to wipe her hands on the immaculate cream sheets of the bed, on the clean white of the carpets. She almost reaches for the bed when another light comes on in the distance.

She smiles. Maybe not here, but maybe somewhere far away—somewhere out there, one of those lights houses her older brother, somewhere out there, he's happy. He's alive and well. She'd been told, two years after her brother disappeared, that he had died.

She didn't believe them then, and she still doesn't believe them now. She's well aware of what the other families are saying: that she's weak, she's unworthy, that she shouldn't become head _at all costs_. She knows and she knows full well that she's only performing now half as good as her older brother had when he went missing at 15. She won't let them win, though. She'll take the role of head just to spite them—just to show them that Nao is a person, not just wasted potential.

She curls over her sketchbook and continues drawing for a few more minutes—finishing a portrait of her brother, who, in her eyes, had aged along with her.

 _Come back soon, Nao,_ she thinks to him, reaching for her dyed graphite. It was always ever the last feature she finished, and the only feature she colored, in all her portraits. The red clashes nicely with the black of the suit she draws him wearing. _I'll welcome you nice and warm_.

 

*

 

 _'In and out, easy,'_ the voice in his earpiece reminds him quietly as he moves, sure and easy and never out of place. He doesn't falter as he whispers locations back into the mike on his neck, looking like the young master he had been once, and is pretending to be again now.

There's a round of applause among the crowd and then—

“Target's on the move,” he says. “I'll take out the closest guards. He'll be within your range in 3.7 seconds.”

 _'Got him,'_ his partner says. He raises his hands as if to clap, welcoming their guest, but at the same time he slides out the nuzzle of the small firearm he keeps within his sleeves. A silencer keeps the sound down to a small whoosh, but no one can deny the sound of a falling body.

He manages to shoot four guards in the three-second interval between his report and their target falling from a snipe-wound on his forehead. He doesn't stay longer than necessary. Joining the foray of panicked guests, he runs to the closest exit, turns left towards the staff rooms, and joins his partner in the emergency stairwell.

“Another job well-done,” his partner says, but neither of them seem particularly pleased. _At least we're not yet dead,_ they both think, as they climb into a nondescript getaway car. He sheds his expensive suit and almost lovingly puts his gun back into its rightful place: a light mahogany box with velvet casing.

“Our orders?” he asks, as his partner starts the car—after lovingly putting his own gun away, of course.

“Back to HQ,” the other man—boy, really, as they both are just within their twenties—“I think we have another job to take care of.”

He doesn't question the lack of breaks, in-between jobs. He knows for a fact that, when it comes to difficult jobs, he and his partner did the best out of all of them. He doesn't really _know_ his partner enough to trust him with his life, but his partner is good at what he does and he's logical. That's more than enough reason for him to agree to risking his life over and over with a practical stranger as his getaway man.

They drive straight out of the city, never looking back. They had checked out of their respective hotel rooms earlier that evening, and all evidences of the existence of _Everett Smith_ , youngest son of finance mogul Paul Smith, have been destroyed.

 _He never existed, anyway,_ he thinks, finally shedding the last of Everett's disguise: a pair of green contact lenses. The dye in his hair will have to be washed out, and he can only do that at headquarters. He'll have to live with blond hair for a little bit longer.

He takes out a small bottle from the dashboard compartment and drops a bit of the liquid into his eyes. When he stops, he almost looks like he's crying. He wipes the excess away with the sleeve of his shirt before putting the bottle back where he found it.

“How long is the drive gonna be?” he asks.

“Six hours, tops. No one knows this car. We can use highways.”

He nods and calculates the amount of time he can rest. “Wake me up halfway there. We can switch.”

“Got it. G'night, princess.”

He doesn't deign to give the monicker a response. He doesn't really know what offset the nickname, or who started it—he had an inkling it might have been his boss, he was _that_ much of an ass—but whenever he asks, they tell him it's because of where he came from. He stops his questioning there.

It has been six years, since he was kidnapped. Six years since he woke up alone and angrier than he had ever been. Six years since he wiped out an entire gang on his own, since he was found wandering alone, since he accepted this kind of lifestyle.

He had already let go of everything that reminded him of that place. The only thing he still had of it was his first name. He has had no plans, no illusions of ever going back, of ever seeing his past again. Well, at least not intentionally. He was content with that he has, what he has worked to have, and he will not allow anything to pull him back… there.

Besides, what they had lost then was a child.

If he ever goes back, all he'll be bringing to them is death.

He closes his eyes and allows himself to drift. He doesn't sleep—god knows how dangerous _that_ would be, on the road with one of the best assassins there is or not. His training and experience would not allow him such a rookie mistake. But he won't make the mistake of exhausting himself, either.

Stoppering all his thoughts, he allows the sound of the engine, the feel of the asphalt, and the scent of the air to lull him to the closest he will ever get to sleeping on the job.

The scent that envelopes him reminds him of things: things he only allows himself to think in these moments of vulnerability, of unconscious; it reminds him of the sun chasing grass, of fading laughter, of childhood drenched in the sweetness of not having to worry about what tomorrow would bring.

 

*

HQ isn't that out of the way from the metropolis. In fact, if seen through legal and economic maps, one can even say it's right at the heart of it. A highrise commercial building, housing several offices, stores, and boutiques, stands as its façade.

Condominiums. Insurance. Realty. Customs.

Their boss was eccentric, no matter how much he denies it. And it shows in the strangeness of his choices. The storefronts as he and his partner enter the building are an array of random colors, some combinations so bad that he almost cringes at the pain the shoots through his left eye. He keeps his eye closed as they walk to the elevators. He has gotten used in recent years to moving around with a single eye: an… unfortunate accident had caused his left eye some damage. None too severe that it's useless, but bad enough that, even with their company's advanced medical technology, high sensitivity still couldn't be avoided.

They reach the elevator bank and turn left, following the maze that is the employee's section of the building. There are so many rooms: some of them used as storage rooms, some as lockers and resting spaces, but most are empty; simply used as fronts to confuse and as excuses. They _do_ provide employment for civilians, and it would be bad if they someone find their way downstairs, to the _real_ company.

He follows muscle memory as he turns one last time, opening the door to what at first looks like an empty storage room. His partner flicks the light on and it becomes obvious what the room truly is: a vertical metal prison. An elevator.

The trip down doesn't take too long. They're tasked to report to their handlers every after mission, and after they've done that, they are sent to the lowest level of their underground lair.

“I gotta go see what Y and the others need at the garage,” his partner tells him, before they could reach the office. They both stop in the hallway. “You're the only one they called in there.”

He shrugs at his partner as he turns, and they go their separate ways. It's not strange that they give them separate instructions at the same time: they are, after all, not officially 'partners' in all the senses of the word. He shudders at the implications of what _partnership_ means in this place, and shudders even worse at the thought of having _him_. He isn't a bad person. He's good at his job.

But… just… not.

He knocks on the large mahogany doors before he pushes it open, one eye closed and the other squinted. The amount of artificial light that greets his senses makes him dizzy, but the preparation was well worth it: he's able to walk straight into the middle of the office without swaying.

(He remembers being fifteen, just fresh out of the streets—cold and hungry and desperate to prove himself; remembers pushing headlong into that very door behind him and almost _screaming_ at the pain that the light causes to flare at the back of his head.)

Until today, he can still feel a phantom throbbing at the back of his head whenever he pushes that door to enter, but it doesn't feel as bad now. He slowly lets his left eye open, staring blankly at his boss's eyes, hidden behind the glares of the lights reflected on the glasses that sit atop his nose.

“Inaho,” the man says, his voice that twist of _indifferent apathetic mocking indescribable_ that had made him uncomfortable when he was younger, and simply gives him nothing but apprehension now. “Job well done on Senator Gwevellonsk. That's one thorn off our side.”

 _Off our client's, you mean,_ he doesn't say. What he does, when he opens his mouth, is, “my next orders, sir?”

A smile twists his mouth—one that looks more wry than human, one that can be imagined more on a tree than a human face. “Always straight to the point, are we? Well.” He shuffles a few folders on his table, moves them about, and then finally turns one and opens the top, gesturing toward it with a sweep of his hand. “Why don't you take a look, young master?”

 _Young master._ He hasn't been called that in six years, and his boss—this man—calling him that _now_ of all times makes the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end. He takes a step forward and looks at the first page on the folder. It's a simple profile, one he has seen over and over: a picture, some text, information, statistics.

What he doesn't find is a date: their due date, some of them like to call. The date they are to die.

The man—boy, really—in the picture doesn't look older than fifteen, looking somewhere above the camera, a worried look upon his features. He looks pretty. Beautiful, even. Blond hair, green eyes, straight nose—he looks like a noble, the son of a rich family.

Inaho reaches out and looks at the next page—and freezes.

The next profile is that of a girl, just as young as the boy on the page before her, skin as white as her name and hair as dark as the sky on the night she was born. Dark smudges cover her cheeks, but he knows it isn't dirt—graphite, maybe. Or charcoal. He almost reaches out to touch her face, almost wanting to submerge himself into that print of color, to touch her with his skin, to feel her breathing and smiling against his skin.

The next page shows someone just as familiar to him as the girl, but this man was older, and less precious. The only words on his page are _Twelfth_ , and _ill_.

Suddenly Inaho knows what the company wants with him, and, for the first time since they picked him up from the streets six years ago, he wants to deny. He wants to tell them, _no, I don't want this, I don't want to listen to you_.

Instead, he steps back and looks straight at his boss, awaiting orders.

“Look, it's high time it happens,” the man says, and nothing in his tone or inflection hints at what their real purpose is. “There's trouble brewing between your family, and the Vers. I know that look, Inaho. You want to say you've forgotten who you were. But you haven't. You remember _her,”_ he continues, gesturing towards the folder. “If two families as big and as powerful as yours start a war, it's going to escalate to something big enough that it will ruin even _us_.

“We will be sad to see you go.” He pauses, but his expression doesn't change. “But this must be done. You do understand, don't you?”

Inaho does, but he doesn't want to follow orders, for the first time. He nods anyway.

In half an hour, his meager belongings are packed in a single duffel bag: his beloved gun hidden at the very bottom, never too far away from him. His clothes have been changed from the black shirt and pants that is nearly standard for all agents of their company to a white shirt and blue trousers: a sweater vest thrown over that and a jacket on top. He appreciates that they took into consideration his preference for warmth over freezing. One last act of charity for a good soldier, maybe.

In an hour he's boarding a private plane that will take him back to the very place where he was taken.

In two hours he's flying over oceans, face still impassive as he watches clouds and sky roll by. He had taken the picture of the girl from the profile folder he had been given. That, he had burnt. This, he holds on to—slowly running his fingers along the edges, alternating looking outside the window and down to the picture of the girl—now a lady—he had once known. He wonders if she has changed at all, how she had grown. She still very obviously loves art as much as she had six years ago, the last time he had seen her.

The one person he considers his family, among all those adults who crowded him, lauded him, venerated him, even. The one person who treated him as a _person_ and not as the heir of a powerful name.

During the third hour, he finally allows himself to breathe her name. _Yuki_.

In three more hours, he will be seeing her again.

On the fourth hour, he begins to wonder if she will continue to call him _brother_ , now that he has come back home, like she had before he disappeared.

 

*

His homeland looks, smells, and feels the same, as it was six years ago, only now he didn't feel safe in its arms: he felt alien, far too bloody and far too hurtful, for its quaint peace. It was his home, the home of his parents, the home of his family.

Or, it had been.

Now it was as strange to him as the motel rooms and highways and airports he had spent time in, as an agent for a company that one hires to kill. As he leaves the airport, a strange melancholy suddenly fills him. It reminds him that it has been six years since he last set foot in this place, since he even thought of coming back. This place was now another map to memorize, another place to explore, a new adventure. He looks to the sky and sees it dark—not with the setting of the sun, but with clouds so gray they were almost black. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, allows himself a moment of calm.

It might be the last he gets of it before he is able to resolve this brewing conflict. He'll have to do his best. He looks behind him and sees the company plane—the same one that had flown him here—take off on the runway, just half an hour after he had gotten off. That would be the last he sees of it. For a while, that is.

He turns around and starts walking, towards a direction he knows like the palm of his hand. If, in that city, he could move around with a single functional eye, here he could move with his eyes closed and not get lost. Some things may have changed, but he feels it in his bones: no matter how much it changes, he will always _know_. He will always be able to learn.

Maybe his boss had been right. He had never forgotten this place, his time, or what he means, here. He had deluded himself enough to be able to function without debilitating homesickness, at least. And now here he is, back at the heart of his childhood, a place that clung to the innocence he had lost.

He finds he doesn't mind, as the intimidating gates of the Deucalion family home rise above him. He looks up at it, feeling nostalgic, and reaches out towards the intercom. He blinks when he touches nothing but smooth glass. He studies it and finds—

A biometric device.

Figures that the family would move with the times, improving their security after their heir had been taken from under their very noses. He doesn't hope much when he pushes his palm against the device, allowing it to read his prints and watching in slight amusement as it flashes red. Did they really think he wouldn't come back anymore that they'd even change the lock on the door? Well, the gate.

 _Semantics,_ he thinks.

He looks up at the gate. He takes a few steps back, and throws his duffel bag as hard and as high as he can. It arcs, almost gracefully, over the spiked top of the metal and then lands with a loud thud on the other side. He apologizes softly to his gun before grabbing on to the highest of the grates he can reach, and pulling himself up.

There's a high chance he'll get shot before he reaches the other side, if they spot him and think him an intruder. But he's willing to take that chance. He trusts his instincts to tell him when a bullet is about to hit him. It has never failed him yet.

When he lands on his feet without much incident, he starts to get suspicious. One try on the biometric device should have tripped some security protocol already: they must be on high alert. And yet here he was, already on the grounds, ready to make his way into the house if they don't stop him. Has the family's security turned more lax? Was he mistaken?

He almost feels a pang of disappointment when something hits him on the side of the neck. When he grasps it and pulls it off—it _stings—_ he finds a syringe dart.

He allows himself a small smile as he looks at it. Already he can feel the drug administered into his bloodstream move about his body. He first loses control over his hand—and he drops the syringe upon the grass on his foot.

Next he loses feeling in his legs—and he falls to his knees. A small smile makes it to his face before he falls on his back, looking up at the dark skies above. A drop of water hits his cheek, freezing him instantly.

 _So it was rain,_ he thinks, before he allows himself to succumb to the beckoning darkness.


	3. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the next chapter! Enjoy.

There's a pounding in his head not unlike the pain when he first entered his boss's office back in the city, when he comes to. It starts at the back of his head, and is echoed in his temples, and finally meets on his forehead, before it ripples back. It goes on and on and on until he finally groans, wishing for more time to rest: at least, until his body had either processed the drug or sweated it out.

“Finally awake, are we?” says a voice from somewhere, and he wishes he could pinpoint where it comes from, because it comes from _everywhere_.

“If this is wakefulness it is _awful_ ,” he manages to say through clenched teeth. When he tries to reach for his head—to alleviate the pain? Just to feel that he still has limbs?—he finds that he can't move them past a certain point. “You've detained me. As expected. It's still _awful_.”

“Who are you?” the voice says again, none too gentle and still as loud as before. It aggravates Inaho's headache and he can only groan in response. “Who. Are. You?!” the voice almost screams, and Inaho almost screams back.

Instead he uses all the willpower he can gather and says, “Inaho Deucalion, heir of the Deucalion family.”

Something hisses, and he feels something stab his arm again. Another dosage of the awful drug, probably.

“Inaho is _dead,_ ” the voice says, right into his ear, and he feels hands like claws grab hold of what little of his consciousness he was able to grapple and control, and it is once more pulled toward the darkness.

 

*

 

When he wakes again, it's less painful. He is able to open his eyes and look around himself, to check his surroundings. He's in the basement, in one of the rooms that they used for these kinds of purposes, back when he had lived here. He closes his eyes and allows himself to relax. He is alone in this room, but he's probably being monitored closely—bug receptors, cameras, microphones, recorders. There is nothing he can do here that his captors—whether they're his family or not—will not know about.

He counts the seconds, instead. And then minutes. When, after an hour, nothing still happens, he decides to hum: a song he remembers from his childhood, the only song that has ever soothed him or his sister during the cold nights between their parents' murder and the main family finding them in the middle of nowhere, tied together like dolls, soaked in the rotting blood of the people who had made them, raised them.

Their captors were nowhere to be found.

The sound of his own hoarse humming does nothing for him now, but just the memory that it sparks: the warmth, the light, the kisses and the laughter, the hot fire that his father would stoke and the stories his mother would read before she sang it to him and his sister… it was enough to lull him to an almost-sleep.

It's disrupted when the door opens, suddenly, and the room is flooded with white light coming from the hallway. The figure that stands there is bathed in shadow, swathed in clothes that hang around its frame. Inaho's eye flares in pain and he closes it. He cannot see whether the figure is male or female, and his head is still too garbled to be able to determine on its own.

“ _Who are you?”_ the figure screams, high and shrill and angry.

He breathes and says the exact same words he'd said last time. “Inaho Deucalion, heir of the Deucalion family.”

“Inaho is _dead_ ,” the voice tells him. “I don't know what you want, why you look like him, or how you know that song. But I know you've hurt him, and you are going to suffer the same fate he had, at your hands.”

“I _am_ Inaho, and I'm not dead,” he says tiredly. His head had begun hurting again.

“So where have you been the past six years?” the voice shrieks. “Why did you never call, never visit, why didn't you ever come back?”

“I was with Circus,” Inaho answers. “And I couldn't come back. Was too busy killing other people.”

There's a pause. When the voice speaks again, it's cold, and Inaho finally realizes it's female. “Inaho would never _kill_ ,” she says. “But I would. And I will.”

Inaho smiles, wan. “Inaho should never had been taken. But he did. And he has killed. And when you kill me, he'll really be dead.”

Silence answers him. When he opens his eyes again, he's alone in the room again.

He didn't really think it would be easy to convince his family he was still alive, that he was finally back to fix what they're breaking with another family. He had expected it to be hard, but not _this_ hard.

But he's been trained as a Circus agent for _years_. He can do _hard_ , if that's what they want.

He'll give it to them, as hard and as painful as they want it.

 

*

 

Yuki doesn't know what to _feel_.

On one hand, there's a man in the basement, looking for all intents and purposes like her brother. On the other, her brother has been missing for six years, but could he have changed _that much_?

Inko is still fuming, tears running down her cheeks in anger. Nina is there to soothe her, of course, as she usually has been since Inaho went missing six years ago. They'd been promised to marry since they were born, for the first twelve years of her life, Inko had learned and taught herself to love him.

Aside from Yuki, she'd been one of the most inconsolable when the elders pronounced him dead, held his funeral, and erected his gravestone in the family cemetery. She visits it every day, cleaning out dried leaves and bringing fresh flowers. Every year she holds vigil on the day he disappeared.

For four years, she had lived with the thought of her first love _dead_. Now he's back, and he's… _different_.

Yuki hasn't been down there to see him. They wouldn't let her. She wants to console Inko, too, but she'd been one of those who advised Yuki to stay away, to not talk to the imposter. But Yuki has to _know_. Yuki has to _feel_.

As she turns to leave the room, she feels a cruel twist in hurt smile at Inko's pain, but the guilt that comes crashing in is _worse_. It's bad enough that she has to hold her weight against the wall. She looks around, and finds no guards, no adults, no _one_ to tell her she can't see her brother. She _knows_ that's Nao. There's no doubt about it.

His voice, his inflection.

He may _look_ different—bigger, taller, hair darker than before—but puberty does that to everyone. He must be over twenty, now: he's an _adult_. They can't keep her from speaking to her just because he doesn't look like his fifteen year old self. She sneaks, though. She moves slowly. She tries not to arouse suspicion. This whole place is rigged with security devices: cameras, microphones, motion sensors.

But living here long enough had taught her how to sneak around and out without being detected. She had done it several times, and she has never been caught before. She moves nonchalantly when she meets someone, and moves sneakily when there's no one in sight.

Finally, finally—she reaches the basement. It's colder here than on the surface: the stone walls let the cold in and dissipates what little heat bodies can generate. With the year almost at its end, it's even colder than usual. Yuki's bare feet slap loudly against the concrete of the ground, and she walks down the harshly lit hallways until she finds the only room with a closed door.

When she tries the knob, she finds it unlocked.

She pushes it in.

“Come to judge me harsher?” comes a low, challenging voice. Yuki almost sobs at the sound of it.

“I've come to see _you_ , Nao,” she breathes, and the atmosphere around her changes: it changes from one of challenge, of fighting, to delight and relief and _god—_

Yuki rushes to the bedside, her hands shaking as she releases the tight, _tight_ bindings that keep her brother's arms to the bed railings, and then he's _there_ , surrounding her, and she's crying into his shoulder and he's soothing her like he has done all those years when they were alone, when she still hadn't gotten used to the idea that their parents were gone and that Inaho was the last one she had left.

“What if I were a different man, you fool?” Nao breathes against her hair, and Yuki holds him tighter, buries her face further into the cold, wet cloth of his shirt. “What if I were _dangerous_?”

“But you aren't,” she cries. “You're my brother, and you're _back_!”

“Oh, my baby,” he coos, and she sobs even harder. For _years_ she had prayed and asked for him to call her that, one last time. She had insisted that he stopped calling her that, when she was eight and she was used to people. _I'm not a baby anymore, Nao,_ she had insisted. _I can take care of you_.

But then the stupid idiot went missing and she _missed_ being called someone's baby, being treated as someone's child, no matter that he was only four years older than she was. “You're back,” she breathes again, but before she could speak anymore, she's being ripped away and she could hear something—

She _screams_ , when she sees a taser, held against her brother's neck. She screams and screams and screams as  his body convulses and falls limp, as she is dragged away and out of the room. She keep screaming at everyone who tries to come near her, who tries to keep her from checking how her brother is doing.

Inko is there, trying to calm her down, but she can't, she _can't_ , she won't calm down until she's by Nao's side again.

“Yuki, Yuki—that's _not your brother_ ,” Inko insists, and, for the first time in her life, Yuki raises a hand and brings it down, as hard as she can, to Inko's face. Everything freezes at the sound of her palm connecting and clapping skin. Inko doesn't even react.

Yuki breathes deep and straightens her back, all regal and the _heir of this family_. “That's my brother,” she says, deadly calm and not herself. “That's Nao. If you prove me wrong, you can execute me along with him. But  what have you done to try to prove his identity? Nothing. All you've done is drug him and hurt him and keep him in a place that would only hurt him.”

“Yuki,” Nina says, her voice even smaller than usual, “all those tests can be faked—fingerprints, eye metrics—a small surgery and—”

“Blood tests?” Yuki snaps. “Saliva analysis? Skin grafts? Do you mean to tell me _those_ can be faked, too? Or are you all just so desperate to believe that my brother is gone that you never even wanted to _try_?”

She looks them all: Inko. Nina. Darzana, her aunt, who stands as her grandfather's secretary, especially now that he's sick. Kaoru, her know-it-all assistant. Calm, holding her brother, gently. Even the soldier who had tased him.

“That's my brother,” she tells them. “And he's _home_.”

No one questions her a second time, simply follows her up to the main house. She orders the maids to clean up Inaho's room, change his sheets and call Dr. Yagarai to the house. He'll arrive in fifteen minutes to check on him. Calm volunteers to change Inaho's clothes, and Yuki lets him. He had been Nao's closest friend, before he disappeared. She'd let Calm near Nao and no one else.

As soon as Nao is in his bed, resting and finally, _finally_ safe, does she allow herself to relax. Dr. Yagarai tells them he's exhausted, and dehydrated, and must be given counteracting multivitamins as soon as he wakes up to make sure his body expels all the drugs that had been pumped into his bloodstream. When he leaves, Yuki does, too, and locks herself up in her room, right across the hallway. She leaves Calm alone in Nao's room to look after him.

She knows that she'll be called to a meeting, soon. She'll be forced to explain her actions, maybe even apologize. But she doesn't care. She has her brother back. She figure things out _later._ Right now, she's tired. She wants to _sleep_.

And so she does.

 

*

 

At midnight, Calm finally leaves Inaho's bedside. He's been staring at that face, still twisted in pain, even as he continues to sleep. Guilt has never stopped churning at the pit of his belly, as he watched the boy who had once been his best friend. _God_ , why _hadn't_ he thought of DNA tests? He might not be a commanding officer, but he'd still been one of those assigned to ensure that their prisoner cannot be a harm to himself or to others.

And, even when the boy looks _exactly_ like the boy he'd played with as a child, even when he looks _exactly_ like the boy he knew would lead the family one day, he still didn't… believe. He never even thought of the possibility of Inaho being _alive._ The sliver of guilt that churned in his stomach got heavier with every minute that passes, and as he stands in the hallway, back resting against the wooden door to what was once Inaho's childhood bedroom—and will probably be his room again, from now on—he presses a palm against his shirt, half-expecting something—blood, goo, _anything—_ to be there, a physical proof of the emotions plaguing his mind, his heart, his very soul.

He closes his eyes and presses his fists against his lids, putting more and more pressure until he sees psychedelic patterns in the back of his mind. Only then does he feel like breathing again, like he's once more Calm Craftman and not some blind soldier who had believed the words he had heard and never questioned those in power.

It wasn't in his blood, it wasn't in his training.

 _Atonement, then,_ he thinks, a morbid amusement lancing through him. He presses his palm against his stomach again, before finally turning around and reentering the room. There's a hypodermic sterile syringe resting within a black box that rests inconspicuously against the bedside table, one he now takes out, slowly peeling the plastic container.

As he presses the needle to Inaho's arm, he mutters a small prayer for Yuki to _not be wrong, please. God, if you're out there, we need this man back._ He pulls the plunger back, pulls the needle out of Inaho's skin, and tapes a clean cotton against the small wound where the needle had slipped in.

He takes off the needle, replaces the cap, and gently sets the syringe into the box again. He stands with his pressed against his hip. He covers Inaho with his comforter and leaves the room, leaves the house, leaves the property. There's a small clinic, down the block—one smaller than Dr. Yagarai's usual clinic, one where they get their men treated and where they get everything that would get their whole family kicked out of the country—or worse, _imprisoned—_ if the state ever found out.

It resides in a duplex, on the second floor. Everyone thinks it's just some random apartment. Calm knocks on the metal door and waits for three minutes, not entering when the door opens a smidgen. All he does is slip the box into the small opening and says, _Confirm it._

The person on the other side of the door says nothing as he closes the door, and Calm does not expect anything as he leaves and walks back to the Deucalion family property.

He's walking, trying to keep thoughts out of his head, and only a few meters away from the gate when he finally realizes that there are people following up. Cursing in his head, he turns toward the next corner, keeping his pace, making it look like that had been his direction in the first place. He looks around him. It's almost midnight, and this is the suburbs. He's suddenly grateful at the lack of civilians: less people to avoid, the easier he can fight back.

This street leads to the park. He would be at a disadvantage there—there are trees and too many hiding places, for his enemies. He counts the footfalls and bets on there being three. If their intel is correct, he can bet on the knowledge that there are at least four more waiting around for them: their enemies move in squads of seven; each squad led by two lieutenants. He reaches into his pockets and presses random buttons on his phone—a signal they'd made out that sends out his GPS location and a distress call, I’m _in trouble, send help—_ before slipping out a Zippo and a pack of cigarettes.

He _hates_ smoking, but he has to keep up his cover.

He takes a left, following the street that will lead to a small basketball court, but before he reaches that, the four anticipated attackers block his way—coming from the corner just up ahead.

Calm stops and spits his unlit smoke, making a mental note to pick it up and throw it properly later.

“Wonderful morning, huh,” he says, eyes on the stupid uniform the Vers family imposes upon their foot soldiers: dark blue, everything. Clothes that look hard to move in. Fancy clothes.

Calm _hates_ it.

“What do you want?” he growls, turning on his side so that he can see the other three who had been following him. “Who are you?”

“Playing the fool, are we?” a man asks, and Calm almost curses out loud when he realizes that both of their lieutenants have come out to play. Nine on one, nice. The man snorts. “Well, you _are_ fools, what did we expect?”

The others snicker or snort with the joke, but Calm doesn't find it funny. The Verses have been pushing their luck lately—sending out squad after squad, every night, closer and closer to the family gates. Calm knows that the war between the Deucalions and the Verses are coming to a head—it has been since the Vers attack six years ago, in sync with Inaho going missing—what with both family going at it for the past fifteen years.

No one knows who started the war, or why. This city—this _country—_ is big enough for both families to reside and move and do business in, but neither is willing to even _try_. The Deucalion forces are slowly getting tired—the family head is sick, his only heir seen unfit for her role, and now someone comes along causing chaos. Now is _not_ a good time for this.

“What do you want?” Calm asks again, his fingers itching to grab the gun hiding underneath his jacket. _Slow down,_ he tells himself, _one wrong move and you'll get riddled with bullets._

“A deal,” the lieutenant says, and Calm twitches. Does he really think— “Yes, it's exactly what you're thinking. Information, on the family. In exchange for a place in the Vers army once we win.”

 _They call themselves an army,_ Calm thinks, dumbly. _Anyone who owns an army cannot be good._ “What the hell?” he says out loud, confusion marring his voice and face. “What the _hell_?”

“The Vers is powerful enough to take over this whole country,” the lieutenant continues, “but if it tries now, it'll only barely survive. With Deucalion gone, though, it will be enough to topple even the neighboring governments.”

Calm feels tired, all of a sudden. _So that's what this is all about. Shit, I gotta get outta here._ “And if I decline?”

Nine hands move, just as fast as he takes out his gun. Nine others point at him, unwavering. “Well, we all know what's going to happen.”

Back-up doesn't seem to want to arrive on time. Calm smiles, straightening his back and pulling his arm, until his own gun rests at his temple. _Might as well,_ he thinks, and for a moment he feels a little melancholy at the thought of never confirming whether the boy in the bed back at the house really is his childhood friend, or if he was just a ploy to cause chaos within the family.

Before he can pull the trigger, though, he hears the unmistakable pop of a bullet passing through a silencer. Not wanting to risk it, he dives and rolls on his back, bringing his gun up and pulling the trigger at the first moving body he sees.

The gunfight lasts only a few minutes.

When he stands, he sees twelve soldiers in all black tying up nine soldiers in blue—fifteen people injured and bleeding but none dead. He lets out a sigh of relief that turns into a yelp when a fist connects with his head. He turns and sees—

“Lieutenant Marito,” he yelps again, saluting his superior. “What are you doing here, sir!”

“You asked for back-up, you idiot,” Marito answers, jerking his head as a silent command that says, _pull out_. “Come on, you owe me a report.”

Calm salutes as his superior turns around, sighing in half-relief when he steps away. Well, _that_ surely did _not_ go the way he had originally planned it to.

 

*

 

Inko is waiting for him outside Inaho's room, when he gets back there. They don't greet each other. There's still an awkwardness left by the episode earlier, Yuki's subsequent fit, and the crippling _fear_ that those few minutes Yagarai had spent alone with Inaho left them. Calm knows he shouldn't hold it against Inko, that it's unfair to take the high road—god knows how guilty he is of thinking his best friend had been _dead—_ but he couldn't help but want to put some blame on someone.

He enters Inaho's room and finds Yuki where he had pulled a chair closer to the bedside, asleep with her head resting near his head. He smiles at the image, pulling a blanket from the sofa—the one he was supposed to use if he slept—and laying it over her shoulders. There's a pillow—he can make do with that. He decides it's time to sleep, anyway, and lays on the sofa.

It doesn't take long for him to find himself exhausted enough to pass out.

His dreams are strange. In his waking hours, he'd blame it on the ambush he had gone through, or on the stress brought about by putting off his report. He dreams of his childhood—of trees so large they look as if they can swallow him whole; of sweet birdsong and of his mother's cooking; of laughter and freedom and a lack of _fear_.

He dreams of a child—not him, not anyone he knows. A random child, walking in front of him; he dreams of gunshots and fire, of ashes and winter. When he opens his eyes, it's to the bright lights of morning. There are soft voices with him in the room: one he quickly recognizes as Yuki, the other lower, different, but still just as familiar to him as it had been six years ago.

He sits up and the conversation stops. “Good morning, Calm,” Inaho greets him, and he closes his eyes, shaking his head.

“Yeah, great morning,” he mutters. “I owe my boss a report.”

“Then get writing.” He doesn't have to look to know there's a smile on his face: not noticeable, but there's a small lilt to his lips that isn't usually there. It's the same expression he has always had in middle school, whenever he tells Calm—or anyone—off for lazying about on homework.

“Yeah, yeah,” Calm says, standing up and stretching his tired bones. He leaves the room without looking at the two on the bed. He just… leaves. He doesn't think he'll be able to want to, if he looks. He'll want to ask questions, questions he'll only know the answers to _after_ the rest of the family had heard. The buzz about the house tells him that they'll be expecting them soon: the elders—the head of the house, his advisers, the aunts and uncles and cousins that haven't been to the family home for years, finally come back.

He goes to his room and pulls up his laptop. He reckons he has about an hour to write and submit his report. He can make do, somehow. He feels something close to excitement as he decides to leave some information out: information he knows only Inaho must hear, only Inaho must find out about. He thinks of Marito, and decides to try out something he'd been wanting to try out for months.

 _I trust you,_ he thinks, and he doesn't know if he means his words, his boss, or a random deity somewhere out there.

 

*

Inaho feels like _crap_ , when he wakes. His head is pounding. There's a numbing sting on his neck that he cannot ignore. And his arm is asleep. He tries to move it—only to find something heavy pushing it and--

“Yuki,” he calls, rubbing his sister's head. He doesn't want to wake her, but his arm is uncomfortable and if he doesn't move it right now…

Yuki groans as she wakes, but she—thankfully—moves her head off of him, smiling at him as he flexes his arm. “'Morning, Nao,” she says through a yawn, and it takes everything in Inaho not to yawn along with her. Instead he looks around, a hard ball of nostalgia knotting at the pit of stomach when he recognizes the room as his childhood bedroom, where he had spent countless nights reading, writing, playing, resting, thinking. Now he was back, and he wonders if this time he can stay. He has never thought he could come back here again.

Yet here he is.

“Nao?”

He looks at Yuki, finding her holding a bottle of pills and a cup of water.

“The doctor says you should drink vitamins and lots of water. How do you feel?”

Inaho doesn't answer, as he takes the cup and the bottle from her. He catalogs the rest of his body: his legs feel numb, but that's probably just the aftereffects of being tied down, and being on his back for hours. His arms, aside from his left arm being asleep, seem fine. His torso feels tender, but it's nothing to the buzzing pain on his neck, where he thinks the taser must have touched him. He's relatively okay, at least nothing as bad as what he had gone through on one mission gone wrong, so he sits up.

Yuki moves as if to help him, but he waves her away. He sees a familiar clump on the sofa in the middle of the room, and he studies the exhaustion that lines his face, his shoulders, even the curves of his limbs. “Calm has grown,” he thinks out loud. Gone now is the boy he had played with as a child—here before him is a man, someone capable of fighting, someone who had probably fought. The nostalgic pain grows inside of him as he realizes that too many things have changed here, since he disappeared. He expected that, of course, and he finds himself amused that he had once thought his childhood would not be touched by the realities of the world.

Laying here, in front of him, and sitting beside him, are proof that things _have_ changed. Probably for the worse. He's prepared for that, though. It is, after all, the reason he had been sent here.

“Nao,” Yuki calls, “the family's on their way here. Are you ready to talk to them?”

“Yes,” he answers readily. He smiles at her, gentle. “I'm taking back my title, if that's alright with you.”

Yuki breathes out, shaky. “A-Are you sure?”

He nods. “I'm sure.”

“Okay.”

Inaho's eyebrow raises in question. “That's all?”

“I never wanted it, anyway.” She looks away from him. “All I wanted was to live with you.”

He's about to answer when Calm sits up from the sofa, looking tired, as if he hadn't just woken up. Inaho greets him first, and they speak to each other almost as normally as they normally would have if they hadn't been separated for six years. But there's a tension in the air, something cloying and suffocating, that dissipates only minutes after Calm had left the room.

Awkwardness, maybe. A bit of fear, some apprehension. But it isn't as normal as Inaho had thought. There was something that was keeping him from settling into his own skin—something essential. He must find out, fast, if he wishes to end this conflict and—

And what, exactly? Go back to Circus? Once again shiv off responsibility to his sister? Leave her alone again? He closes his eyes, suddenly very, very tired.

“Yuki,” he says, “do you know where my bag is?”

“It's—uh,” she says, “it was… confiscated. You were carrying a gun.”

“I have to keep myself safe, now don't I?”

“Nao—”

“Never mind that. Do I have clothes?”

There's a pause. “Nao, how tall are you?”

Inaho doesn't answer, for a few minutes. “How rude,” he mutters. “A hundred and seventy,” he says anyway. It's something that his partner had pointed out to him once, something that his bosses never stopped teasing him about. It made him _cute_ , apparently, and every _day_ he had wanted to just grab a knife and drive it into their ribs. “Why the sudden question?”

“Well, you _do_ have clothes,” Yuki answers, “from six years ago. You haven't really grown. I'll have the maids adjust the cloth to fit you.”

He opens his eyes and stares at his sister, but she's already standing and leaving his side. He doesn't miss the amusement that shines in her eyes, though, and he makes a mental note to find a way to get back at her somehow. The small domesticity settles in his bones like dust on old cupboards. Suddenly, his life at Circus feels much farther from him than the life he had resolved to put in a jar, six years ago. “Get my bag,” he calls to Yuki, before he hears his bedroom door close.

He only half expects the door to open, just a few seconds after that. When he looks, he sees a familiar dark head, twiddling thumbs, and an air of awkward tension fills the room.

“Hello, Inko,” he says, because, after all, what else do you say to your first ever love after she had tried to kill you?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please do tell me what you thought about the chapter/the fic so far! Thanks so much!

**Author's Note:**

> leave some love?


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